“I was quite famous by then myself, so that solved the problem for me. “In the heyday of the band I had a hunch that Thijs van Leer would take the name Focus for himself,” says Akkerman, who has since released over a dozen albums under his own steam. The run of commercial ended when Akkerman and van Leer clashed over musical direction following 1975’s Mother Focus. But the band ultimately couldn’t sustain two forceful egos. They enjoyed another huge hit single that year with a reissue of Hocus Pocus, and readers of Melody Maker voted Akkerman the world’s greatest guitarist. So Thijs would respond by doing the same thing on the organ.”įocus consolidated their status with extensive tours of the UK and America throughout 1973. Then Jan would rip hell out of his guitar and completely destroy what Thijs had just done. Thijs would play these extraordinary flute solos and play the organ at the same time. Jan Akkerman and Thijs van Leer were two very strong characters, both incredibly good musicians and very creative. One minute they were a band you’d never heard of, then the next you couldn’t get into the gigs. “I knew this band was going to be huge,” states Mike Vernon, who took over as Focus’s long-term producer with Moving Waves. All of which meant that Focus were well primed by the time The Old Grey Whistle Test broke them on a national level. Second LP, Moving Waves inched up the charts, NME voted them Best Talent Of 1972, and Melody Maker crowned them as the year’s Brightest Hope. They played at the Reading Festival in August ’72, followed by a Melody Maker Poll Awards show in London, where they very nearly upstaged Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Through a combination of serendipity and sheer aptitude, Focus had swiftly established themselves as a new hot property. They didn’t know what the hell was happening. At the show, they were exposed to all this yodelling and other stuff. There was nothing else for people to do, so the only possibility – was to go and catch the Focus drift. “He brought a power generator over with us, and we were playing at London University when the strike was on. “Our manager had a stroke of lucidity,” Akkerman recalls. Their first UK tour coincided with that year’s energy crisis, when the miners’ strike resulted in a series of power cuts and the three-day week. By the time Focus recorded it at Olympic Studios in Barnes during the summer of 1972, they were already breaking through on the international circuit. Van Leer decided to call the finished version Sylvia as a teasing reminder to Alberts of a missed opportunity. The first and second verses were both done in five minutes, so altogether it took ten.” So the song’s timing and phrasing come from there. “I heard some guy on trumpet in one of these bands, and he had such a beautiful tone, such beautiful phrasing. “In my younger years I used to listen a lot to marching bands,” Akkerman explains.
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